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Thursday, January 02, 2014

`A Morality of the Eye, a Justice of the Tongue'

“(with Davenport there’s always a further
connection to make)”

Like his
subject, Guy Davenport, Eric Ormsby makes an art of the elegantly deployed
parenthesis. For pedestrian writers, the enclosure is an afterthought or surgical
suturing in wounded prose, not part of the body in question. In his intellectual-autobiography-in-brief,
“Finding,” Davenport writes:

“If I am
grateful for the unintentional education of having been taught how to find
things (all that I have ever done, I think, with texts and pictures), I am even
more grateful, in an inconsequential way, for my father’s most astounding gift
of all: being put at the throttle of a locomotive one night and allowed to
drive it down the track for a whole five minutes.”

In twelve
artfully bracketed words, Davenport defines his art and his critical eye. Ormsby’s review of
The Guy Davenport Reader
(Counterpoint, 2013), edited by Erik Reece, is a family reunion of sorts
(kinship means more than biology). Nine years ago, Ormsby wrote a moving tribute
to Davenport after his death. With Davenport he shares writerly dexterity
(prose, poetry), devotion to form, imagistic concision, formidable multilingualism, a scientist’s precision
and a scholar’s abundant learning. Both by nature are celebrators and reliable
pleasure-givers. Neither is careless with words. Both possess the virtue
identified by Ormsby in Davenport’s prose: “virtually every paragraph—indeed,
virtually every sentence—comes as a surprise.” That’s a rare gift, not to be
confused with lazy surrealist novelty. Ormsby’s reading of the early masterful story
“The Aeroplanes at Brescia” is itself masterful.

Ormsby
shares three of my four quibbles with Reece’s selection (the fourth, less
serious, being his choice of stories, though Davenport never wrote a bad or
mediocre one, so it amounts to a difference in taste): the absence of his
writings on art (on Balthus, Burchfield and Tchelitchew he was formative to my
hobbled artistic education) and his own graphic work, and of any evidence that
Counterpoint employs sighted proofreaders. Ormsby writes:

“In fact,
churlish as it may be to say, the book could easily have been twice its size,
and all the better for it, though that is surely not the editor’s fault. (Where
is The Library of America when you need it?) Second, the book, though
handsomely produced, is riddled with typos and misprints from beginning to end.
I spotted at least a dozen on first reading. Are there no copy-editors left?”

An
inspired thought – Davenport anointed by the Library of America (they found
room for Lovecraft, Sontag and Dick). And let’s have more of his letters and
uncollected reviews. Ormsby’s reading of Davenport, however, is less than
worshipful. He makes a salient point about the fiction:

“His
characters are all vivid wraiths. The sheer beauty of his prose obscures this;
as a result, his stories often read like essays, his essays like stories. This
may not seem a major shortcoming—after all, the blurring of genres is intrinsic
to his approach—but it is, and it weakens Davenport’s fiction. He was not a
writer suited `to suffer dully all the wrongs of man,’ as Auden wrote of the
typical novelist.”

True
enough, but fiction is sufficiently generous and forgiving to make room for
both Pérez
Galdósand Borges. (Davenport calls
Eudora Welty “one of the greatest American writers in all our history,” and
likens her to Samuel Beckett.) No one reads Davenport’s stories looking for social
realism. Ormsby rightly singles out for praise the great story narrated by
Robert Walser – more kinfolk (Davenport collected them) -- “A Field of Snow on
a Slope of the Rosenberg.” He wisely notes Davenport’s indelible Americaness.
For all his cosmopolitan tastes and devotion to International Modernism, Davenport
was as all-American as Marianne Moore and Sitting Bull. Ormsby writes near the
end of his review:

“His is a
morality of the eye, a justice of the tongue. As such, he stands in the
tradition of Emerson and Thoreau, of Melville and Whitman and Dickinson.”